Screws and Wheels

To introduce Screws, I drew a diagonal line on a sheet of paper with a fat marker, then I cut along the line. I asked K. what it looked like: an inclined plane. Then I took the paper and wound it around a pencil so it looked like a screw. To experiment with screws I pulled out my cookie press and stuffed a large piece of tissue paper in the tube (instead of cookie dough). Then we held the button down and watched the tissue paper get pushed out of the tube. After that K. played with the threaded rod from the cookie press, making the nut go up and down. We also screwed screws into some pre-made holes.

To learn about Wheels, I put a LARGE and HEAVY book on the table and had K. push it from one end of the table to the other. It was hard to do. Rolling it on something would make it easier. So we put markers under the book and pushed it along. This worked well, but we had to keep putting new markers under the book, so it was tiresome. The rollers needed to be attached to the book, or the book needed to be on something with wheels. K. went and got her little plastic wagon, but the book was too heavy and the wheels didn't turn, so we got the Tinkertoys out and made wheels, set the wagon on the wheels and the book on the wagon. It worked!